mackay@dalcsug.UUCP (Daniel MacKay) (02/12/88)
This is a success story and thank-you to Frank Uzzolino.
I saw his article in comp.sys.apple about the format of an
AppleWorks WP file, a while back, and filed it absentmindedly somewhere.
I'm a student at Dal who does a lot of consulting with Apples on the
side.
Today, someone (a lawyer here in Halifax who is a total computer feeb)
called me in sheer panic; he has a //c with an A-E Ultra 2 with
700-odd K of memory, and he had just put the finishing touches on a
130 page decision he's been working on for a month, and had had a
full disk.
Now:
- of COURSE he doesn't have a backup. ever.
- of COURSE it's never been printed.
- the A-E expansion automatically segments files over several disks
BUT it requires that the volumes have the same name, so it had saved
as much of the file on the disk as it could, and asked for another
one with the same volume name.
- he forgot (or perhaps never knew) that you can format disks happily
from within AppleWorks, so he saw no way to save the file
- he then panicked and turned off the computer (instead of calling me
and asking me to for help, silly man)
- remember that an A-E expanded AppleWorks will overwrite the old
copy of the file if there's not enough room on the disk for both
old and new (it asks before zapping the old copy) while it's saving
(a feature I really like, should have been built into AppleWorks from
the beginning). Of course he had done this.
Anyway, the end result was that he had 90% of the only copy of the file
saved on the disk, but Appleworks wouldn't load it (cauze during loading,
when it asked for the next disk of the segmented file, there was no next
disk, so it wouldn't put it on the desktop.)
So I called up Applied Engineering, and they faxed me what I thought
were the instructions for retrieving documents in this predicament.
They were; except they were for Spreadsheet and Database documents only.
Called up again. Oh, a WP document? What I was supposed to do with
that was make a new WP doc out of the old one, pretending the old one
was a text file.
Well, I tried that. It was a mess. A total mess (try it some time).
So I dug out Frank Uzzolino's description of the AWKs WP file format,
hauled out my Prodos Machine Language Exerciser (not a half bad ProDOS
byte-level editor and general carving tool if you know what you're doing,
it comes with the ProDOS toolkits) and had at it.
All I had to do was hack off the file at the end of the last complete
line, and put two bytes, $ FF FF, at the very end. Now Appleworks
thought it was a complete file, and it loaded it complete with formatting,
missing just the tail that the lawyer typed that morning, that wouldn't
fit on the disk.
That's all there was to it. Now, net.land, understand how badly
I felt charging this lawyer all afternoon at my top rate for retrieving
a month of his work, lost through such an unfortunate and unforseeable
accident. :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (-: (-: (-: (-: (-:
Thanks again, Frank. -daniel
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